Waitomo

Waitomo, officially Waitomo Caves, is a rural community in the King Country region of New Zealand's North Island. There are several solutional cave systems in the area around the village, which are popular tourist attractions. Restaurants and accommodation are centred in the village to serve visiting tourists.

The word Waitomo comes from the Māori language: wai meaning water and tomo meaning a doline or sinkhole; it can thus be translated to be "water passing through a hole". The caves are formed in Oligocene limestone.

Māori lived in the Waitomo Caves area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Opapaka Pā to the east of the village was occupied by Ngāti Hia in the 1700s. One of the first two explorers of the Waitomo Glowworm Cave in 1887 was Tane Tinorau, who lived nearby and knew the entrance to the cave as a good spot for catching eels.

The limestone landscape of the area has been the centre of increasingly popular commercial caving tourism since before 1900, initially mostly consisting of impromptu trips guided by local Māori. The Waitomo Glowworm Cave near Waitomo Caves was nationalised by the Crown and managed as a tourism attraction from 1904 onwards.

There was tourist accommodation at Hangatiki in the early 1900s, and by 1904 accommodation and a store had been built at Waitomo Caves. In 1909 the government built a hotel, and the village gradually developed to support increasing tourism to the caves in the area.